1, 2, 3…

1, 2, 3…

Testing…

Testing…

OK!

Top Reading Activities

Robert Hill

BEFORE-READING ACTIVITIES

Good readers make predictions.Make students ‘hungry’ to read.Top-down processing, and not

bottom-up processing.

Encouraging learners to predict

a) Extract a significant sentence from the text and ask ‘What do you think happens to lead up to this?’ The sentence can be from anywhere in the text. e.g.

‘He looked at the prince with his big , brown eyes, trying to tell him something, but the prince was very angry.’

Encouraging learners to predict

b) Write some significant words or phrases on the board. Learners predict how they might occur. e.g.

• a prince• his wife• his son• a dog• a wolfWrite a one- or two-sentence story using all the

words. Give a time constraint (e.g. 3 minutes).

The prince, His dog,Llewelyn Gelert

babyhuntwolf

gravekill

The Welsh story of GelertHis grave in the

village of Beddgelert in north Wales (a legend!)

()L

Encouraging learners to predict

d) ‘Who says it?’ (which makes you think of why they say

it, too)‘Who said it?’ for after-reading:

comprehension and characterisationLanguage work in the gap-fill (some

bottom-up processing)

The ‘Myth’ of Sherlock HolmesIn 1893, Conan Doyle decided to end the Holmes

series with his death in The Final Problem.But more than 20,000 readers stopped reading

The Strand magazine.And readers in black arm bands stood outside his

home in London.In 1901-02 Doyle wrote another Holmes story

(set before Holmes’s death in The Final Problem), called…

The ‘Myth’ of Sherlock Holmes In a further collection of 13 stories,

The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1903-04), Conan Doyle describes how Holmes escaped alive from the encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

The ‘Myth’ of Sherlock HolmesAmerican actor William Gillette first played

Holmes on stage in 1892. He introduced:- the Meerschaum pipe- the deerstalker hat- “Elementary, my dear fellow”Basil Rathbone in The Hound of the

Baskervilles (1939) and 13 more films introduced the Inverness cape

Dozens of actors have played Holmes on film, TV, stage and radio:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_actors_who_have_played_Sherlock_Holmes

According to Sir Ian McKellen…

“Our notion of what Sherlock Holmes is comes not from the novels, but from everything that’s happened since. There are all these versions of Sherlock Holmes, and they all add up to an impression we have.”

Which actor or illustration

- is closest to / farthest from the description in the text? (despite Ian McKellen’s comments)

- is closest to / farthest from your personal idea of the character?

Can you improve on the character’s appearance?

1865-2015: 150-Year Anniversary1865-2015: 150-Year Anniversary

1865-2015: 150-Year Anniversary1865-2015: 150-Year Anniversary

Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations in an edition of 1865

http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/gallery/2015/jul/04/alice-in-wonderland-150-years-alice-day-cs-lewis-john-tenniel-hilary-mckay

Appearance (or Looks)element of Indirect Characterisation

(i.e. ‘showing’, not telling’)The STEAL acronymSpeech (what the character says)Thoughts (what the character thinks)Effects on other charactersActions (what the character does)Looks (appearance, and ‘accessories’)

STEAL

Speech: ‘Who says / said it?’ (choosing most representative lines)

Thoughts: ‘Thought tracking’ (students imagine what characters are thinking at a particular moment) (or pictures)

Effects: Writing in role from different povs (points of view) (later)

Actions: Diaries, confessions (later)Looks: Web search (e.g. Holmes, Alice)

Reading Diary

in the Guide to Graded Readers on the English Catalogue page of the Black Cat website.

Writing in role

• Letters & notes to friends / relatives (while reading)

• Diary entries (while reading)• Final declaration – even a confession

– to another character in the story, to posterity, to the reader (after reading)

Writing in role• Constraints in Cambridge writing

tasks: Key 25-35 words; Preliminary about 100 words; First 140-190 words

• Contemporary communication: text messages (160 characters) & tweets (140 characters)

Main characters &Minor characters

A post-modern trend is giving a voice to characters without a

voice in the original text

Teen Fiction (by Lisa Fiedler)

Some characters…• Mr Rochester / Bertha Mason• Count Dracula• Heathcliff / Cathy / Edgar / Hindley• Long John Silver• Man Friday• Mr Darcy (& other Jane Austen characters)• Shylock• Iago

After-reading tasks with constraintsA mini-sagamini-saga - 50 words exactly. Challenging!A summarysummary – exact number of words. e.g. 100

words (or 150, or 200)With a summary, students can take away words or

add words. This practises comprehension, interpretation and language skills.

You can specify parts of speech.Practice: summary of the Gelert story.

The shortest summary of all...

The Title

Full title of the 1719 editionThe Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of

Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates.

Titles with names in them…

But there is usually a constraint of length on titles!

How many titles with names of characters can you think of?

(In pairs. Time constraint: 10 seconds!)(In fours. Time constraint: 10 seconds!)

Themes

Setting(and therefore atmosphere)

Mystery

Symbolism (in titles by modernist writers)

Allusion, quotation

Allusion & quotation

Allusion & quotation is more usual in the 20th century, e.g.

Far From the Madding CrowdWhere Angels Fear to TreadGo Set A Watchman

Invent titles for these two stories

A and B on the handouts

A: Two greedy businessmen want to destroy a beautiful wildlife reserve in New Orleans, where Andy and Brian have summer jobs, and they plan to build a huge shopping center. Mysterious and terrible deaths, and an ecological disaster shock the people of New Orleans. Andy, Brian and Megan decide to solve this bizarre mystery, but can they find the important document that will save the wildlife reserve and its animals? Suspense and danger run high as time runs out… Set in one of America’s most unique cities, this is a baffling mystery solved by three young detectives, with an unexpected final twist.

B: Karen, Sally and Alex are three teenagers who take a camping trip at Yellowstone National Park during a wolf alert. Two of the park’s wolves are missing and the three teens decide to look for them. Their trip becomes an exciting, yet dangerous adventure when they meet a hungry grizzly bear, an angry mountain lion and a herd of bison that destroy their tent. Will they ever solve the mystery of the missing wolves? 

Explicit titles: wysiwyg

What you see is what you get

Less obvious titles

C, D & E on the handoutsa) Invent titles for themb) Match the blurbs C, D & E to the

titles I will show you

C: Seren wants to go on a school trip to Paris more than anything. But when her Dad won’t even let her walk home from school by herself, how is she going to convince him? Determined not to give up on her dream, Seren comes up with a plan. But she quickly learns that even the best plans can go wrong, and even the biggest dreams can end up broken. She needs another plan fast. But will it be good enough to convince her Dad?

D: When a mysterious birthday present arrives from somebody she doesn’t know, Helen realises that there’s something strange going on. With her cousin Will, she discovers a terrifying secret which is hundreds of years old and a curse which has almost destroyed her family. It’s a race against time to solve the mystery and stop the curse, before it destroys them too. 

E: Bella and her friends, Elise and Gracie, are going on a school trip. But then they get lost. They set out to find their school friends and the youth hostel where they should be staying but before they can find them, strange and spooky things start to happen. First Bella sees a mysterious girl in the woods, then Elise witnesses a discussion between two men which will reveal some dangerous secrets. Their friends are unaware that they are in danger and it is up to Elise, Bella and Gracie to save them. But how? 

Chapter Headings• The strategies for inventing book titles• Epigraphs (quotations from inside the chapter)

are possible.• Students – alone, in pairs or groups – invent

new chapter headings.• Students say/write a new heading, the rest of

the class guess which chapter it refers to.• Class votes on best new headings.• Invent a new title for the Gelert story.

‘Visual’ Summaries

Film Posters

Some early posters tend to show moments of

the plotthe plot

Other posters – & especially recent ones – tend to show

the themethe theme

‘Taglines’

‘My only love sprung from my only hate’ (a quote from the play)

‘The most dangerous love story ever told’

Posters• Create a poster showing the major

theme(s) of the book• Create a tagline, with or without a poster• We’re going to look at some posters of

Othello.• ‘Salience’ (= prominence) and

interpretation of the story & theme• Evaluation of posters

Top Activities

Robert Hillrobhill.vr@gmail.com

Competition in The Guardian3 May 2001

1st PRIZE

txtin iz messin, mi headn'me englis, try2rite essays, they all come out txtis. gran not plsed w/letters shes getn, swears i wrote better b4 comin2uni. &she's african 

Competition in The Guardian3 May 2001

4th PRIZE

Reunion Slough Reading Didcot Parkway my face flashes between telegraph poles, solemn as the passport photograph no one recognises 

Which Dickens novel is this?Prove ItStubborn ThingsSomething TangibleRust and DustOur Hard-Hearted FriendSimple ArithmeticA Matter of CalculationTwo and Two are FourA Mere Question of Figures

Which Dickens novel is this?

According to CockerThe GrindstoneThe Gradgrind PhilosophyMr Gradgrind’s Facts

Hard Times

A famous non-Shakespearean quote

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

from Wind, Sand and Stars (French title Terre des hommes), 1939, by

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Next, a ‘retelling’

A

xx”)MMM

An

‘x’()L

SCARTO

Encouraging learners to predict

x) Extract some significant sentences from the text (from 3 to 6), write them on the board in scrambled order, and ask the class to suggest the order in which they will occur (this will make learners think about plot).

• E.g. Some sentences from today’s story are:

Scrambled sentences from today’s story

(a) (…) When Prince Llewellyn heard the baby crying his sword fell on the floor. He was alive!

(b) (…) It was a long, terrible fight. But the baby slept peacefully and did not wake up.

(c) (…) ‘You’re safe with old Gelert. He’ll look after you till I come back.’

(d) (…) ‘You killed my son – my only son! And I trusted only you!’

Encouraging learners to predict

x) Extract a passage and eliminate some of the words or phrases (gap-filling procedure). This is a prediction activity, not a language test, so eliminate words to do with plot / character. Ss fill in the gaps & then check their ideas when they read.

e.g. from today’s story: When Prince Llewellyn heard the ........ crying his sword fell on the floor. He was alive! He looked around the room and saw a dead ........ in a dark corner. Then he understood!

Character Building

Imagine a character’s: • Hobbies and sports (to play and to watch)• Music. What does he/she listen to? What

instrument does he/she play?• Favourite food & drink (mealtimes). What

does he/she cook?• Habits• Colours

Character Building

• Favourite clothes, accessories • Habits• Favourite possessions (What have they

got in their pockets, drawers, ‘dens’?)• Home (house, flat) and furniture. How is it

decorated? Favourite room?• Favourite books, films, paintings• Favourite characters in fiction and film

Character Building

• Historical person they most admire• Favourite place (city, town, village, natural

environment)• A perfect day• A perfect holiday• Gifts they would like to receive• Ambitions• Ideas of yours…?• For major or minor characters?

Backstories• Create biographical factfiles for characters • More elaborate texts than factfiles (e.g. on

fansites, e.g. Game of Thrones) http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Characters

• Imagine what a character was like at a certain age (e.g.10, 15, 20, 25 etc.)

New Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch

Backstories• Prepare to interview the characters (create

questions), then conduct the interview (answer the questions – written or oral)

• Most interesting backstory questions might be about what made characters the way they are

Character Building & BackstoriesChoose a Shakespearian character. Can you use any of the

character building ideas? Can you imagine any backstory?-Hamlet; Ophelia; Claudius; Gertrude-Macbeth; Lady Macbeth-Othello; Desdemona; Iago-Romeo; Juliet; their parents; the Nurse-Shylock; Portia-Prospero; Caliban-Richard III; Henry V-Julius Caesar; Brutus

Some characters…• Count Dracula• Heathcliff / Cathy / Edgar / Hindley• Mr Kurtz (in Heart of Darkness)• Miss Jessel & Peter Quint (in The Turn of

the Screw)• Long John Silver• Man Friday• Mr Darcy (& other Jane Austen characters)

Some characters…• Dorian Gray / Lord Henry / Basil• Captain Ahab / Queequeg• Gatsby / Daisy / George & Myrtle Wilson• Mr Rochester / Bertha Mason• Peter Pan, Wendy• The children in The Railway Children• The children in The Secret Garden• The sisters in Little Women

The reader writes back……in role:• as a friend• as an ‘Agony Aunt’• as a journalist, police officer, social worker

(change of audience)• as a poet (acrostic poems, haikus)• Can you think of any more?• Reading Diary (See Black Cat Readers Guide

pages 38-41)